I would NOT call this frugal at all, actually. You are overspending in a lot of places and under spending in others. $281.32 per month for such a simple service is...astonishing. Change Vercel and Intercom with Cloudflare and Chatwoot (self hosted), and you have saved $120/mo. Get rid of Ahrefs for Ubersuggest (or no SEO tool at all) to save about $80 more. That leaves you with $81.32/mo. If you try even harder, you can easily bring that under $50.

But I get it. If X tool saves time, why not pay for it? I wouldn't call that frugal though because you are still spending where you can save.

Given that a large portion of this spend is currently covered by expiring (in less-than-a-year) one-time credits, it's really not representative of what it claims to be and is therefore quite disingenuous & misleading.

> I use AWS EC2 for Waitlist's backend python webserver, RDS for the postgres database, S3 for file storage, and an Elastic IP. I use T2 and T3 instances. My AWS bill would be $200-300 a month

Seems like a high bill for what sounds like basically a hosted email list? I would have expected compute and storage costs to be very low.

E: This was NOT a point about how cloud costs are ridiculous. Even for cloud this seems high.

I wouldn't say this one to be frugal, but then frugality varies by different parameters. What they priortize (Eg: a dedicated marketing tool vs sending marketing through app itself), what their expertise in (hosting in vps vs aws vs heroku, etc), the type of service, team size and so on. As there are 10 ways to do the same thing all with a different tradeoffs.

Being solo myself, I aim to keep my costs as low as possible as well. Until my last product, all my previous products I kept the running costs to $3 per month (just for the server on hetzner). Rest all were free services (tawk.to for CS, Zoho for email, postmark for emails, and so on). Granted they weren't making much, just couple of hundred dollars per month, but then it was pure profit and it got fun to measure the returns in profit than just revenue.

For the latest one, all in all I spend around $30 per month with close to $1250 in mrr. So it has generous spend to return ratio. The only three running cost are the helpscout (for customer support, docs, etc.), google workspace and the servers with Hetzner. HelpScout and Google workspace were my way of "splurging" the costs.

Last I checked I was using close to 16 services (ranging from marketing to revenue tracking), so weren't really skimping on tools to save costs either.

The free tools (including several the op mentioned) are awesome to get started, but many of these services' costs would jump multi-fold even if you add one other team member or go just above the limit. That's anyway all these services' business model as well.

Should anything trial be considered "frugal"? The moment you run out of free tokens, you have to shut down or actually get frugal, which is the difficult part... Would you ever include "Photoshop trial" in a list of "frugal software I use for design"?

Why spend $300 in AWS credits to begin with, when you can use Hetzner, and switch to cloud when absolutely need to? (or shut down)

As someone not deep in the startup game, it's interesting to me to see what others are doing for their stacks, so I appreciate this being shared. Two things stood out to me from this list more than anything else.

First, the author is clearly a hustler, as many of these definitely-not-cheap services are being paid for under free credits. Cheers to them for that. If AWS is willing to give someone $5000 to get going, take it and run. I do think that makes it slightly disingenuous to then say one is running their business on the cheap, but if they can get profitable before that well dries up, who really cares and no one is hurt.

Second, and I saw this theme in the comments as well, if these are valuable services, they're worth investing in. SaaS uptime is definitely important, and it would be a silly risk to self-host such a thing. Frugal is a good way of looking at it, but if these tools help ultimately make money, they're worth paying for. I think that ties in to point 1, where the free services are meant to help you prove that out while also entrenching you slightly if it holds. But as someone who is notorious for yak shaving, being able to shove code out the door and not worry about the rest of it is deeply appealing and worth the gamble.

I can’t imagine Intercom is worth like 1/3 of the budget. I’ve never used one of those AI pop ups and have always felt them annoying

>Google Analytics

>No surprises here. I used to use Plausible, but that costs money and you can't beat free. Monthly cost: $0.

Thanks hard pass. I checked and Plausible starts from 9 Euros a month. This is hardly what I'd consider advertising material. But likely I'm just not their target audience.

There's also no consent banner, so this doesn't seem GDPR compliant

Edit: I must have phrased this in a confusing way. They are NOT using Plausible but GA. I'm well aware cookie-less analytics does not require consent